Ensuring Accurate Lesson Plans

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The training team has recently initiated a conversation about how we will ensure that the lesson plans that our team produces will continue to be up to date when WordPress itself is updated.

Questions we have asked so far include:

When do we start tracking our plans to make sure they are up to date?
Do we start tracking after the plans have been copy edited and ready to test?
Do we only pay attention to completed approved plans?
How should we track the changes to WP and which plans they may impact?
How and who will do the updating of content?

In the fall of 2014 we explored an idea in our meetings and at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. San Francisco about adapting the Content Audit pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party or something similar for use in tracking changes from the dashboard of make.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//training. This was an idea that was thoroughly researched and documented by @juliekuehl in this post: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2014/11/08/request-for-the-content-audit-plugin/. Moving forward, we should continue this conversation as part of the larger conversation about how to ensure accurate lesson plans.

The conversation has boiled down to two fundamental issues that we need to address, which are:

What process will we use to make sure plans are up to date?
When is a plan considered “complete enough” to start tracking to ensure it is accurate?

This post will be the place where we keep a running documentation of our conversation around this issue. Please leave your thoughts in the comments!

#content-audit, #procedures

bethsoderberg 12:05 pm on August 18, 2015
Initial thoughts on this subject from the August 4, 2015 meeting include:
- If we have a lesson plan that hasn’t been tested yet and it ends up 2 versions behind what is current in WP – that’d be bad for the person testing the plan and for the students . – @courane01
- P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. would be a good place for this discussion, rather than SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. – @juliekuehl
- Maybe anyone who is in the list of current LP authors gets a pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” about upcoming changes when they come out, but then anything that has already been approved to test is handled differently. – @bethsoderberg
- Sorting out what needs to be updated could be good tasks for contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. people. For the actual updating of content maybe we could ping original author, and if they are not available submit on for others to just tweak. – @courane01
- I have no idea how reliable pinging the original author would be, perhaps we could ping them if we know they are active (AKA have shown up to meetings lately) but otherwise open up for others? – @bethsoderberg
- Some minor updates aren’t super urgent for lesson plan updates, but some create a very different experience if the lesson plan being tested doesn’t match up with what they student and instructor have installed. – @courane01
Mike Mueller 5:37 pm on August 18, 2015

I especially like this: “Sorting out what needs to be updated could be good tasks for contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. people. ” I think that’s a great thing based on my experience at WCSF.
Courtney Engle Robertson 5:38 pm on August 18, 2015

If in addition to reviewing if content is current, people could review the style guide and copyedit.
bethsoderberg 10:07 pm on September 13, 2015
As a team, we’ve discussed these issues during our August 18th and September 1st meetings and came to the following conclusions regarding each major question associated with this topic.

1. What process will we use to make sure plans are up to date?

Moving forward we will use a new column in our Lesson Plan Tracking Spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AWYtGfQ0BI0_7qAi50ryLzZGg0MfgMW_9d9CCAXOzWo/edit#gid=239943130) titled “Ongoing Review” to identify the lessons that need to be revised because of changes to WordPress itself. Team training will divide responsibility for monitoring changes to WordPress itself between regular contributors to the team and contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. volunteers. The tracking process will cover major or point releases and will include the following steps:
- We will use the change logs found in the codex (example: https://codex.wordpress.org/Version_4.3) and the release blog posts (example: https://wordpress.org/news/2015/08/billie/) to determine whether there are plans that need to be updated.
- If a component of WordPress is significantly changed in an update of the software itself then we will run a keyword search to flag ALL lessons that mention that component.
- We will review the flagged lessons and remove any from the list that aren’t affected.
- Any lesson plans with confirmed updates required based on updates to WordPress itself will be redirected to the team training queue of plans that need content updates made to them.
Long term we’d like to consider automating parts of this process, possibly involving the content audit pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party that we’ve discussed a few times (https://make.wordpress.org/training/2014/11/08/request-for-the-content-audit-plugin/) or a variant.

2. When is a plan considered “complete enough” to start tracking to ensure it is accurate?

A plan will be considered “complete enough” to start tracking once it has entered the testing phase. Lesson plans that are available for testing are listed here: https://make.wordpress.org/training/testing-modules/lesson-plans-to-test/. Eventually once we have completed final plans we’ll have a list of those that we’ll use for tracking purposes as well.

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